Meet Miss Lupulin and the Beerd Wrangler

I’m not exactly sure when I first met Dev Adams, AKA Miss Lupulin, as there very may well have been beer involved. Regardless, we gradually became friends over our shared passion for craft beer. Dev’s knowledge and tasting ability is truly amazing. She is the first person that I would turn to if I had any questions about beer. I later met Dev’s partner in life & beer, Josh Norton (whom Dev affectionately calls the Beerd Wrangler). Simply put, Josh embodies the friendliness of the Colorado brewing industry.

Dev: I am a Colorado native from Littleton, currently working full time for Colorado Parks and Wildlife as an Information Systems Manager and System Administrator. That pays the bills. In what I call my “real life” I am an Advanced Cicerone ® and Certified BJCP judge and consult and blog under the name Miss Lupulin. I also design craft beer-related jewelry called Beerings.

Josh: I’m mostly from Colorado (I came here when I was seven) and have been a professional brewer for five years. I am currently consulting for a brewery that will be opening in Frisco in the spring and looking for another permanent Brewing job. I just make the beer – Dev is the one who knows everything about it.

Both: we met during GABF week in 2006 when we were both working for the Flying Dog Brewery on Blake Street. Dev was the tour guide and tasting room manager and Josh worked on the bottling line. In the intervening 11 years, we have visited 637 breweries together, including (obviously) all of the breweries in Colorado.

When and what was the first Colorado brewery that you remember visiting?

Obviously, Flying Dog, September 26, 2006. Our second was Great Divide, when we took a couple of dollies worth of grain over to them when they were short. This industry has always been about camaraderie, which is what has fed our passion for it.

Josh & Dev at Flying Dog Brewery in 2007 (photo by Josh Mishell)

When and where did you accomplish the status of having visited every Colorado brewery?

Our 2017 New Year’s resolution was to finally visit every brewery in Colorado. As luck would have it, we discovered that our final Colorado brewery would also be our 600th brewery, and we wanted to make it a special one, so we chose Mountain Cowboy in Frederick, which had just opened. Our 600th brewery was almost Coors, but we just couldn’t complete the quest and have our 600th brewery not be a craft brewery. We finished the quest on December 30th, just under the wire to hit my resolution. In 2017, we visited 142 new breweries, 72 of them in Colorado.

Josh & Dev at Mountain Cowboy

What are some of your favorite memories of your quest?

Josh: for my birthday in 2014, Dev surprised me by setting up private tours at the not-yet-open Casey Brewing & Blending and Roaring Fork Beer Co. It was awesome to meet the guys opening those places and get an early peek at what they were doing (and an early sip).

Dev: the whole journey has been special to me since it’s essentially a story of our relationship. We don’t count a brewery unless we have been there together, which I think makes our quest unique. I have so many amazing memories that it’s hard to pick even a small handful, but they all come down to the relationships we’ve built:

– Meeting each other at Flying Dog (duh)

– The year of Sundays we spent at Twisted Pine drinking pitchers of Billy’s Chilis

– Being greeted with a handshake by Scott at Wit’s End on their opening

– Meeting Rick at Brewery Rickoli, which lead to Josh getting his first brewing job

– Hitting our 150th brewery, Cannonball Creek, on opening day and having Jason shake everyone’s hand as they entered “thank you all for being here… wow… thank you so much.”

– The two breweries we hit on June 22nd 2014 – Broken Compass in Breckenridge and Chain Reaction in Denver – have become family. Just coincidental that we hit them both on the same day.

– Josh’s birthday trip in 2015 where we brought our new family member, Brew Dog, to all of the breweries in Fort Collins

– Camping out in our 4Runner as we traveled around Southwest Colorado visiting breweries for my birthday in 2016 and 2017Sometime along the way, I decided that we needed to take a selfie at every new brewery we visit, and I document those on my Instagram. It reminds me of all of the places we’ve been and the crazy, amazing people we have met along the way. Not to mention the incredible beers… so many incredible beers.

Josh & Dev at Cannonball Opening

What are your favorite styles of beer and your top breweries in the state of Colorado in terms of your beer taste?

Dev: I drink just about everything, and my tastes change by the day, so it’s hard for me to pick a particular style I gravitate towards. However, I’m always looking for a great Biere de Garde, I love all of the different interpretations of saisons, I adore a great pale ale, in the fall I cannot get enough Marzen and Festbiers, I generally judge a brewery based on their simplest beer – kolsch, cream ale, blonde. I also love breweries doing wild fermentation… it’s such an art.

Dev: I love taprooms that are cozy and comfortable; someplace I want to hang out for a while. Copper Kettle was the first brewery we visited that I was really attracted to how comfortable it is. I’m also such a Colorado stereotype as I love wood and fireplaces and a general feel of being in the mountains, but I also love anything that’s unique, because too many taprooms are following the same general aesthetic recently. Some of my favorites:

What advice would you offer others trying to become a Colorado Brewery Master?

Enjoy it! The point of the quest isn’t to stop at a brewery, shoot down a taster, and roll to the next one. Yeah, that means you’ve “been there”, but you haven’t really visited. Have some tasters, get a full pour, settle in, chat with staff. You can buy fantastic beer at any liquor store in Colorado; visiting breweries is about the experience. We live in an amazing state for craft beer, so take your time drinking it in.

I am truly lucky to know Dev & Josh and it is a joy to see their smiling faces when we run into each other at a brewery or fest. I look forward to sharing many more beers together in the future.